1. SEO AND HOW IT BECAME
THE ESSENTIAL DIGITAL
MARKETING CHANNEL
POST-COVID

2. ABOUT ME
• 10 years experience in Digital Marketing with
focus on SEO
• Accomplished in managing SEO projects, both
from in-house and agency roles, in Global and
APAC region
• Former Regional SEO Lead, APAC at HSBC
• Co-founder of Annelle Digital, Digital Marketing
Agency ( https://www.annelledigital.com/ )
• Currently, Senior Manager, Search Business
Analyst at FWD Insurance

3. COMPANIES I’VE WORKED WITH
Here are the companies I have worked with on my in-house and agency roles:
• Nestle APAC
• FedEx APAC
• PayPal HK
• Promise Finance
• HSBC APAC
• FWD Group
• Standard Chartered
• Johnsons & Johnsons
• Hyatt Hotels Global
• Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts
Global
• Peninsula Hotels Global
• Wynn Macau
• Lanson Place Hotel HK
• Regal Hotels International
• Star Cruises

4. INTRO TO SEO

5. WHAT IS SEO?
Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the
process of optimizing your webpages in order
to make a website relevant to users’ query and
rank higher in unpaid search engine listings
leading to increase on organic traffic and
leads.

6. SEARCH ENGINE PROCESS
Search engine
spiders crawl the
web and discover
pages via links
Spiders learn what your
website is about through
content (keywords, meta
data, H1, etc) and index
information on database
Spiders serve the most
relevant results based
on evaluation to online
users
RENDERING
SEARCH ALGORITHMS
(200+ Google ranking factors)
UX Signals
Content Quality
Off-site Citations
Relevancy
HTML&CSStobe
downloaded&
parsed
JS has to
be
downloaded,
com
piled
+ parsed
and
executed, 2 m
ore
steps.
1st
Wave
2nd Wave (Render Queue)
CRAWL
INDEX
RANK

7. 3 MAIN SEO STRATEGIES
Technical SEO
On-page SEO
Off-page SEO
Technical SEO - optimize the website’s accessibility and
indexability to search engines by controlling bot behavior and
search indexation through various techniques.
On-page SEO - optimize factors within the website that
influence organic rankings on relevant search queries.
Off-page SEO - increase the website's overall authority by
analyzing and expanding citations from external sources.

8. ORGANIC SEARCH
RESULTS TYPES

9. REGULAR WEB SEARCH -> UNIVERSAL SEARCH
• Pages found on the Web, typically
showing page titles, meta
description, and URLs
• Optimizing the Title tag is one of the
most effective ways to associate
your webpage to a keyword.
• Regular search results have
transitioned to Universal Search.
• Organic sitelinks and different type
of snippets could also appear.
URL
Title Tag
Meta Description
Organic one-line sitelinks

10. IMAGES
• On-site images Appearing on
search results can be obtained
by adding Alternative Text
• Images on universal search are
taken from Google Images
repository

11. VIDEOS
• Extracted from YouTube
• Limit the title to 60 characters while
description to 100 characters.
• Insert your target keyword to video file,
Title and description to optimize,
categorize the video and tag with
popular keywords related to the topic
to optimize
• Videos on search results triggered by
“How To” queries
Title Tag
Meta Description

12. MAPS AND LOCAL 3-PACK
• Listing on both Maps and Local-3
pack can be obtained by
verifying the site to Google My
Business
• Local 3-Pack is triggered by
location-based queries
https://www.mdsdecoded.com/bl
og/google-local-history/

13. NEWS AND TOP STORIES
• Website needs to enable AMP,
submit the news to Google and get
approved to be listed on Google
News
• Featured websites on Top Stories
are from publishers and websites
that include content marketing as
its strategy and publish blogs often

14. ZERO-CLICK SEARCH RESULT OR NO CLICK
SEARCH RESULT
• Answer to the user’s query are
displayed at the top of a
Google search result without clicking
on a link
• Triggered by queries can be about
currency conversions, time zones,
word definitions and “how to x
• Zero-search result texts are around 54-
58 words

15. SUMMARY
• Regular web search results that used to only serve website links during the
early days of Google has been replaced by Universal Search
• Universal Search refers to search results that don’t only include website links
but also other verticals such as Images, Videos, Maps, Stories and other
snippets.
• To appear on other Google verticals, there are certain SEO strategies needed
to implement such as Alt text for images, publishing video on Youtube,
verifying your website to Google My Business, etc.

16. 2021 SEO TRENDS

17. MACHINE LEARNING
HOW TO OPTIMIZE?
• Create high quality and relevant
content
• Optimise for conversational queries,
long-tail keywords, and question-based
queries
• Google might give preference to
websites that win UX signals (CTR, Time
on page, readability)
WHAT?
• Hummingbird algorithm marked the
beginning of NLP
• NLP (Natural Language Processing) allows
Google to process words in search queries
in relation to all the other words contained
in the query
• RankBrain is Google’s name for a machine-
learning artificial intelligence system
• BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations
from Transformers), helps Google
understand the context of the words such
as conversational queries and use of
prepositions.

18. CORE WEB VITALS
WHAT?
• Google announced in May adding Core
Web Vitals as ranking factors for page
experience.
• Largest Contentful Paint – being able to
see your page
• First Input Delay measures - the time it
takes for a user to actually interact with
your page.
• Cumulative Layout Shift - how stable a
page is as it loads
HOW TO OPTIMIZE?
• Optimize the page based on the
results from tools such as Page
Speed Insights, Lighthouse and
Chrome Dev Tools.
• Reference: web.dev/vitals.

19. MOBILE FRIENDLINESS
WHAT?
• Google moved to mobile-first
indexing in July 2019 and will be
switched for all websites to March
2021.
• Mobile-first indexing means Google
predominantly uses the mobile
version of the content for indexing
and ranking.
https://developers.google.com/sear
ch/mobile-sites/mobile-first-indexing
HOW TO OPTIMIZE?
1) Implement responsive web design
2) Do not use separate mobile URLs
3) Add Structured Data
4) Add Image Alt Text
5) Make sure that Googlebot can
access and render your content
6) Same content on desktop and
mobile
7) Follow the image and video best
practices

20. VOICE SEARCH SEO
HOW TO OPTIMIZE?
• Target long-tail terms
• Publish content that answers “who,
what, when, where, why and how”
questions
• Verify your site to Google My
Business to appear on local search.
WHAT?
Voice search SEO is a strategy that
optimizes the content to enable your
voice search on devices that runs
through digital assistant to rank on
top of search results.
• Known digital assistants are Google,
Siri and Alexa.

21. E-A-T
WHAT?
• EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness and
Trustworthiness) are quality
standards primarily affecting YMYL
(Your Money or Your Life) websites.
• YMYL are websites that offer
financial or medical information that
could impact mental, physical, and
emotional well-being.
HOW TO OPTIMIZE?
• Have quality content aligned to
what your clients value and prefer
• Aim to get links/mentions from
official business listings, .edu and
.gov sites
• Build relationships with journalists to
get links/mentions from publications
• For content authors, aim to get
published from different high-level
sites to demonstrate expertise
• Work on reviews
• Engage on forum discussions

22. SUMMARY
1. Machine Learning - write high quality content that answers user’s query
2. Core Web Vitals – optimise your site’s loading speed and page experience
3. Mobile-friendliness – prioritize optimising your website for mobile search
4. Voice Search – publish short and direct answers to questions typically asked
via voice search
5. E-A-T – build your website’s authority for your blog topic and get your
content written by an expert to gain Google’s trust

23. BENEFITS OF SEO
POST-COVID

24. FOUR CONSUMER TRENDS
Economic Impact
Companies optimizing costs are
expected to add to economic
woes. Organizations must quickly
understand the economic impact
of COVID-19 on their customer
base.
Erosion of Trust
Trust in brands is eroding,
with reputational risk
especially precarious if
corporate values do not
meet those of customers
Rise of Digital
Companies should rapidly
adopt digital to reduce
cost to serve and meet
customer demand for e-
commerce.
Home is the new hub
Companies should seek to tap
into the growth of the
community, the demand for
localization and new
'essentials' such as homeware.
https://home.kpmg/xx/en/home/insights/2020/06/consumers-and-the-new-reality.html

25. COST-EFFECTIVE METHODS
Q1 2020 advertising spend dropped
by 28% accdg to a study by
admango . Goals remain the same.
Difficult to convert sales from social
marketing according to 42% of the
respondents from a Nielsen study
SEO bring consistent long term
performance growth without any
advertising budget required
https://www.campaignasia.com/article/early-adspend-impact-of-covid-19-in-
hong-kong-much-sharper-than-sars/459325
https://www.verizonmedia.com/hk/insights/hk-advertising-spending-projection-
survey-2020-highlight

26. RANK CONTENT UPDATE
Number of monthly searches remained constant but conversion
rate from paid search decreased according to WordStream
Customers are searching for expert advice or to get some help
and not looking to convert
https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2020/03/18/covid-19-google-ads-data
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/special-announcements

27. CAPTURE FRESH ONLINE CUSTOMERS
1 in 4 consumers were replacing
in-store shopping trips with online
according to a study by
Numerator.
SEO helps on bringing traffic and
designing the website structure
that is easy to navigate for
consumers
https://www.numerator.com/resources/blog/impact-covid-19-consumer-behavior

28. ENFORCE ONLINE AUTHORITY
Consumers have a preference shift
towards engaging with leading
digital organisations according to a
report by KPMG.
Companies that are consistently
ranking high on search results have
top of mind advantage leading to
improved branding and are
deemed trustworthy.
https://home.kpmg/cn/en/home/insights/2020/11/impact-of-covid-19-on-hong-kong-consumers-behaviours.html

29. SUMMARY
1. SEO is cost-effective. It can be run without any advertising budget
eliminating organizations’ concern of wasting money due to low conversion
rate.
2. SEO can bring new website content such as changes on value proposition
or messaging to match customer’s concerns on top of search results.
3. SEO can help on bringing traffic as well as designing the website structure
that is easy to navigate for consumers even for those who are non-digitally
savvy.
4. Websites optimized for SEO and are consistently ranking high on search
results are deemed trustworthy.

30. Q&A